In previous versions of Testimony, a number of bot stability issues were encountered during the playback. They often manifested themselves as the following:
- Bot crashes
The bot executable simply stops working. If this was within a popup MS DOS prompt, then the window disappears. If the bot was started via the command line, then it simply ends the executable and returns.
- Bot freezes
The bot machine completely freezes (effectively a windows crash but without the blue screen of death). The mouse does not move and nothing can be run upon the bot. The bot is also not able to be pinged from the central system. The only solution here is to restart the bot machine which will result in all open SAP GUI sessions that it was running to be cancelled.
- Bot stops but is accessible
The bot goes “inactive” in the “Active Bots” grid of the playback monitoring. It will now no longer be provided any more work to be done. However, existing scripts may finish off and it is possible to ping the bot.
In all of the cases above, the reasons for the instability were caused because of the following:
- Bot over-loaded with too many SAP GUI sessions
Dependent upon a couple of factors including OS version and RAM, each bot is only capable of supporting a certain maximum number of SAP GUI logons and sessions. If too many made to be open at the same time on a single bot, then this would either overload the free memory or it would simply crash the bot.
Extensive work has gone into solving these two key issues including the bot load distribution algorithm to help distribute the load across the bot farm more evenly for SAP GUI dialog transactions.
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